


someday / sometime

by mosaicofhearts



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: First Kiss, Hugs, Love Confessions, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Canon, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25408648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosaicofhearts/pseuds/mosaicofhearts
Summary: “You ever feel like somethin’ was missing?”Richie had said, voice breaking around a hiccup, cheeks dusty rose with burst blood vessels.“During those years? Like - Like you were missing a fucking arm or something?”And Eddie had said yes, even though that wasn’t technically the truth.Something had always been missing - he’d felt that much. Felt the aching loss of something that he had never been able to put a name to until all those memories - the good and the bad - had come rushing back to him, bursting through the dam of his ribcage and flooding the forest of his heart, felling the veins of trees that had grown there over the years.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 34
Kudos: 224





	someday / sometime

**Author's Note:**

> hey, it me.
> 
> i wrote this bc i'm poorly and feeling sorry for myself and needed a distraction. writing helps! i should definitely have worked on my other wips instead but :')
> 
> it's essentially a post-canon fix-it snapshot that is a love confession that i don't have anywhere else to put, so u can have it on its own.
> 
> it's incredibly soft and basically just fluff, so be warned.

“When are we going to do something about this?”

The words themselves are innocuous; innocent, even. They should not feel like the sudden burst of icy cold against sleep-warmed skin, should not leave Eddie feeling like a smoking match whose flame has just been doused in an unexpected instant. 

There are a thousand thoughts that echo around his head in the moment, but one far stronger and far more dangerous than most. _He knows_. He knows, he knows, he knows - it starts as a whisper, the tone of the words mocking in nature and giving him cause to squirm. From there, it only gets louder, until it drowns out everything but the pounding of his heart reverberated in his ears. 

_He knows._

What are you going to do about it, Kaspbrak?

Blindly, he thinks he might run. He could run. Richie Tozier is six foot something and has a lot of mass and muscle on Eddie, but he wouldn’t try to stop him. He’d let him go. If Eddie looked him in the eye right now and said, “ _I can’t do this, I have to go_ ”, then Richie would step aside, silent as a grave for perhaps the first time in his life and he would not try to stop him.

Sometimes, Eddie wishes he would. Just once he wants to know what it would be like for someone to beg him to stay; not in the way his mom and Myra used to, with their words dripping in faked affection and their voices grating on each and every one of his senses until staying had seemed like the only viable option anyway. He’d just wanted them to shut up. It had always worked.

He wants to know what it would feel like for _Richie_ to ask him to stay. Because he can’t bear the thought of losing Eddie again, because he doesn’t want anything from Eddie except everything that he has to offer, because they spent their lives missing one another like a phantom limb and the second time would be so much harder to overcome. 

It was never a phantom limb for Eddie. Not like it was for Richie

Once, Richie had looked at him from across the dining room table in the shitty apartment Eddie had been renting out. He’d seemed nervous, sweat dipping into the creases of his brow, luculent eyes finding purchase on the wood of the table, the white of the wall, but never at Eddie for longer than a few seconds, caught beneath brows doing their utmost to join in the middle like they hated to be apart.

Eddie had wanted to soothe his frayed edges. He had reached across the table in a rare act of bravery, his own steady hand - steadier than he had felt; he’d been surprised to see it so still - covering Richie’s tremulous one like a shield. He had wanted to take Richie’s anxiety with touch, as though this was a feat that could be managed through the power of osmosis, Richie’s nerves bleeding into Eddie instead. Because Eddie was used to feeling that way - like every fibre of his being was shaken to its core, like the ground beneath him was shifting with every step, like one false move could bring his world down around him.

He hated it. But he’d still take it from Richie, if he could.

Osmosis or not, it had seemed to help.

“ _You ever feel like somethin’ was missing_ ?” Richie had said, voice breaking around a hiccup, cheeks dusty rose with burst blood vessels. “ _During those years? Like - Like you were missing a fucking arm or something?_ ”

And Eddie had said yes, even though that wasn’t technically the truth.

Something had always been missing - he’d felt that much. Felt the aching loss of something that he had never been able to put a name to until all those memories - the good and the bad - had come rushing back to him, bursting through the dam of his ribcage and flooding the forest of his heart, felling the veins of trees that had grown there over the years.

But it had never been an arm for him. Nor a leg. Nor any other limb that it could possibly be.

For Eddie, his phantom limb had always been his phantom heart. The part of him that had been missing had been the most intrinsic part of a person.

He knows that now, because it’s come back to him. It beats hard and fast in his chest, often drumming at an erratic pace that lends itself well to his existence, reminding him that he’s alive. That, more importantly, he has them back - Richie and the others. But mostly Richie.

Eddie Kaspbrak got his heart back.

He isn’t so sure that he would survive losing it again.

The near chanting in his head is impossible to ignore now. His skin prickles with goosebumps despite the fact that the air conditioning system has been broken for three days - he _told_ Richie to get that fixed, he knows he did - and his mind clicks through all the options that he could whip out in response to Richie’s question, like looking through that old Viewmaster he’d had as a kid, each press of the button providing a new outlook: _I’m sorry; It’s not what you think; You don’t get to be a dick about this_. In the end, he settles on the thing he’s best at: denial.

“I don’t know what you mean.” He says flippantly, forcing himself to meet Richie’s eyes. That’s how you really sell a lie, he knows. You don’t avoid eye contact. You look at them, act like you’re confident in what you’re saying.

Disappointment flickers across Richie’s face like the shadow of candlelight, illuminating the whites of his eyes and the bridge of his teeth protruding over his lower lip. Disappointment could mean any number of things. It could mean that he’s upset that Eddie feels that he has to lie to him (the most probable options), or it could mean that he’s upset that Eddie doesn’t want to address the question he’s posing.

The latter speaks of possibilities, Eddie’s mind a treacherous slope of hoping and wanting. Possibilities sting. He’s been faced with plenty of them before; possibilities of love and of freedom. Each time he has come away broken and bent, his body now curated from the fractured pieces of him that were left behind by other people. It started with his mother; he likes to believe it ended with Myra. To them, he had been something of a doll. Theirs to care for and own and mould. They hadn’t looked closely enough at the splintered seams, the emptiness of once warm eyes glittered with stars, the lack of anything substantial in his chest. They hadn’t seen the warning signs.

He had never wanted to be a doll. The splintered fragments of his body, the mismatched pieces of him sewn together only with the sheer force of his own volition and the love of his friends - he has grown to take pride in that. 

The only person who could ever take him apart again, undoing the careful stitching, picking at the filaments of his stature, is Richie. Eddie could pass him the blade and bow his head. A part of him wants to give over that power. Another part of him is frightened that Richie wouldn’t know how to put him back together again, not in the right way.

“Eds. Come on.” Richie frowns at him. He doesn’t close the distance between them. Eddie is grateful for that. Eddie hates him for that. “You know what I mean.”

“I just said I fucking didn’t, Rich. Why don’t you enlighten me?” Eddie’s speed of reaction gives him away, a spark to an open fuse. He’s already biting too hard and too deep at the bit, but it doesn’t give Richie the satisfaction that it usually would.

Usually, it’s all a joke.

 _He knows. He knows. He knows_.

“You’re playing that card? Really? Why do you have to make everything so fucking difficult?”

“Oh, because everything is _so simple_ with you, isn’t it?” Eddie snaps, slamming his hands palm down on the table between them, leaning his full weight onto it.

This is good. He knows how to handle this; they’ve been arguing for years, even with that chunk of missing time in the better part of their lives. Usually they dance across the tightrope of playful, a hazardous line that sometimes Eddie’s traitorous body mistakes for flirtation. It’s hard not to think that, sometimes, when Richie is tucking him into his side with a muscular arm over his shoulders; when he’s tossing his head back to laugh raucously at whatever Eddie has said, showing the long line of his throat with tendons flexing, that makes Eddie want to bite; when he’s looking down at him with azure eyes gleaming mischievously, dropping an “Eds” from his lips that is as tender as the steak he’s cooked for them just a few hours before.

It’s difficult in these moments for Eddie not to imagine it to mean something more. When their heads are bent so close that their breaths mingle into one, sweet and sour and a taste Eddie wants to chase; arms brushing and causing the hairs there to stand upright with the current of an electric shock moving beneath the surface; thighs sticky warm beneath clothes, where they are pressed together because they are so determined to contort their bodies to fit into one chair not really capable of taking the two of them, despite the couch being _right there_. 

He imagines what it would be like to kiss Richie so often, in his dreams that spill out into reality and everyday life. He imagines them on beaches somewhere faraway and secluded, in the city surrounded by people and not giving a damn, on rainy days with their shirts sheer and clinging to their bodies, in bed after they have spent an entire night together. Morning kisses with bad breath that doesn’t bother him because it tastes like Richie. Lazy kisses when they’re both too tired to move, limbs aching and bodies sated. Hungry kisses with mouths slipping and sliding in their haste to get closer. Kisses around laughter until it’s nothing more than noses brushing and teeth knocking. Kissing against the kitchen counter, on the couch, in the shower, anywhere and everywhere they can.

Eddie’s never considered himself to have an oral fixation before - even the term makes him blush, filling him with this need to sit on his hands to stop them from taking him to places he might regret. But he’d googled it once, after too many nights of his gaze catching on the cushion of Richie’s lip, bright pink and soft red, damp from the tip of his tongue dancing across the seam. 

He thinks about Richie’s lips a lot. Too much to be considered normal (except none of this would be considered normal anyway, because Richie is supposed to be his best friend and nothing more). 

Now, those lips are twisted into disbelief. “Nothing about my life is simple. Are you kidding me? You remember me pissing away my career before Derry, right?”

“You pulled it back,” Eddie says, because he did. Richie should be praised for that, but Eddie isn’t much in the mood for compliments right now.

“Clawed it back, more like.”

And that’s fair. It hadn’t been easy, Richie returning to LA with his tail between his legs and nothing that could pass as a good enough excuse for his agent. But Eddie hadn’t doubted that he’d get himself back on track and he had; splitting his time between LA and New York as if it was that simple, because everybody seemed to know that out of all of them, it was Eddie who was the biggest mess. Eddie who had his life blasted into smithereens.

Richie’s been sticking around for Eddie, and maybe that’s the part that’s complicated about all of this.

“We’re not -” Richie looks frustrated, but his features soften when he looks at Eddie, hard lines into melted butter. It’s not fair, the way he shifts when he looks at Eddie, until Eddie dreams of moving forward. “We’re not even talking about my career right now, what the fuck?”

Eddie wishes they were.

“Eddie,” Richie says, words quiet and soft but still managing to leave bruises when they land. “We need to talk about this.”

He supposes they do, really. It’s already too late.

 _He knows. He knows. He knows_.

If he knows anyway, what else does Eddie have to hide?

The overwhelming weight of his love for Richie Tozier has been bearing down upon him for quite some time now. He thinks he knew it even back on that first night in the Jade, looking at Richie for the first time in twenty seven years and feeling a deeply staggering warmth inside. It lit him up everywhere; Eddie had never felt much like he’d shone for anyone, but that night he felt like maybe he did, glowing beneath the attention of someone he could not believe he had forgotten.

He’d felt like an exposed nerve for that entire night. Every time Richie had touched him, no matter how absently, how innocently, it had sent shockwaves through Eddie, starting from the point of contact and spreading out as far as it could reach. He still feels like that, he thinks, even eight months later. 

“So,” he’s proud of the unwavering quality of his voice, albeit surprised. “You want to talk about the fact that I’m in love with you.”

He forces himself to look at Richie, forces himself not to break eye contact, and it hurts to look at him in this light. He’s so _Richie_. From his squinty eye to his pronounced overbite to the three day shadow grazed across his cheeks. Eddie doesn’t think he’s perfect, but he does think he’s beautiful. Perfect for someone. Perfect for him, he wishes.

It’s a mistake to look at Richie, because from this vantage point with only the dining room table to separate them, Eddie can see his expression transform so clearly. The image of it will be branded into his mind forevermore - the drop of the mouth that brings with it an audible click of the jaw; the blown expanse of his eyes; the softness that becomes confusion, becomes uncertainty, becomes something that Eddie cannot place. Doesn’t have the words for. Doesn’t recognise.

_He didn’t know._

Eddie shouldn’t have _assumed_. The blood rushes from his face with the shock of the realisation that Richie didn’t know what Eddie thought he knew, and he feels his knees buckle for all the wrong reasons, his palms still flat on the table the only thing keeping him up. He curls his fingers around the edge of it to give him some more stability, swallows around the chokehold of his truth stuck in his throat.

He’s an idiot. He’s spent his entire life moving with precision, planning everything so as to avoid situations like this. The most awkwardness he has dealt with in his life has been from spats with coworkers when his temper and their idiocy gets the best of him, but these things - declarations of love falling flat… they do not happen to Eddie Kaspbrak. He’s too careful.

“Well, shit,” Richie says weakly and Eddie can’t even look at him. “That’s not where I thought we were going with this.”

Eddie blinks down at the table. “Clearly. You can - you can forget that. I thought -” 

He doesn’t get out the rest. That he thought that Richie knew, so that saying it wouldn’t be as embarrassing as it is now. That he would have swallowed back the honesty as bitter as it tastes and as heavily as it had sat in his stomach for so many months if he had known that Richie didn’t have a damn clue that Eddie was harbouring this for him.

“I mean…” He sounds nervous. It makes Eddie look up on instinct, though he fights not to tear his gaze away the moment his eyes land on Richie’s pale, sweaty face, glistening somewhat beneath the light and still so handsome. “I thought we were talking about me.”

It throws Eddie off. The statement makes little sense as far as he is concerned, not pertaining to their current situation, and he asks before he can think better of it, “What about you?”

Honestly, he’s teetering between the edge of annoyance and humiliation. Humiliation for the obvious - annoyance because Richie is somehow making this about him. It _is_ about him, to an extent, but Eddie’s about to have a breakdown and he’d rather run and deal with that alone in his apartment than have to listen to Richie ramble on about whatever self problem he has that he thought they were addressing.

“I thought we were talking about me,” Richie repeats. Eddie instinctively tracks the movement of his Adam's apple when he swallows, the bulge of it enticing even now. He’s ridiculous. “And how I’m in love with _you_.”

For the second time, Eddie feels the weakness in his knees as they buckle, this time from a place of unexpected elation rather than a place of fear. He wants to vanish the table, he thinks crazily, mind running wild. He wants to get rid of the table so that there is nothing stopping them from being right there with one another, and he feels bizarrely frustrated in the moment that he cannot vanish the table. Until he remembers that he can just walk around it.

He doesn’t quite yet, mostly because he isn’t sure his legs will get him there in their current state.

“You love me.” It’s meant to be a statement but lilts upwards at the end like a question; searching for confirmation.

“Yep,” Richie lets the ‘p’ pop noisily, his cheeks now dangerously red. Eddie imagines that he would burn the tips of his fingers if he touched them - he immediately wants to see for himself. “And you love me, apparently.”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah,” Eddie replies. It’s breathless, a little wisp of a thing, and he would hate it if it didn’t seem to have an instantaneous effect on Richie.

The broadness of his shoulders relax, the hunch that he usually wears them in suddenly fading, a smile breaking out onto his face that is more crooked than dashing, and Eddie flies around the table, knocking his knee against one of the legs in the process and not giving a single damn about the pain that comes with it. It feels distant, far away, like it doesn’t really exist. Not in this time and space, not in this world; this world where he gets Richie. All the other worlds can go fuck themselves as far as Eddie Kaspbrak is concerned, because this must be the best one.

They meet clumsily. Eddie thinks he wants Richie’s lips on his and he thinks Richie must think this is what he wants too, but they’re both surprised when he doesn’t go in for that; in for the kiss he’s been thinking about so desperately. 

He is weightless with a head full of cotton, his vision gauzy, and he wraps his arms securely around Richie’s waist the moment their bodies collide not so gently. His grasp is too tight he knows, but Richie doesn’t say a thing about it or against it; Eddie can sense his hands (large hands he’s wanted on him for so long, oh God, everywhere they could possibly touch) hovering uncertainly over the expanse of his narrow back, before one settles there over the wing of his shoulders, Richie’s other arm winding around his own waist. 

They fit. Eddie had always imagined they would. Like puzzle pieces lost from the jigsaw of their lives together for so long, but now back where they ought to have been this entire time. 

Richie smells like too strong aftershave and cedar from his shower gel, and Eddie presses his face into the chest before him, breathing it in. The swell of Richie’s stomach presses against his own toned midsection, their bodies in juxtaposition with one another but still _right_. 

If Eddie is the lock, stony and tied up and secure, Richie is the key, lighting him up from the inside, opening him to the possibilities of this and more beyond that.

“Always knew you were a hugger,” Richie’s head is so voice that his breath tickles across the outer shell of Eddie’s ear when he speaks, tone smug.

“Fuck you,” Eddie grumbles. He doesn’t move, though, doesn’t bother to deny it beyond that. He’s never been a cuddler, truth be told, but Richie is softness and curves and warmth and Eddie thinks he could be, for him. _Knows_ he will be, even.

“Well, if that’s on the table…”

He does pull back at that, to glare up at Richie with his face heating at the intention behind that comment, falling into the glisten of Richie’s eyes all over again the moment their gazes meet.

It’s easy from there. Their bodies are still tangled together, pressed foot to foot and chest to chest, and their lips meet without delay. Kissing was never easy for Eddie, not before. Chaste, awkward, unenjoyable. A chore, if anything, a task he felt was expected of him.

This isn’t that at all. It feels like slipping into a warm bath and jumping from the highest cliff all at once. Richie doesn’t push or pull, but he does give; his lips supple beneath Eddie’s. Eddie is the one who presses forward, who licks at the seam and begs for entrance, who explores Richie’s mouth like it’s a map of a world he hasn’t had the chance to discover yet. He knows so much about Richie but it isn’t enough - he wants all of this and more.

He wants the kisses and the tears and the happy ever fucking afters, because isn’t that what they deserve?

There’s a smidge of urgency about it that dies down quickly enough until they’re parting slowly. Slowly because they keep moving back together in conjunction, pressing soft kisses to each other's lips until they become close lipped again, until they can pull apart. 

There doesn’t need to be any urgency to this, Eddie thinks, because they have the rest of their lives to figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> all feedback and comments are mega appreciated!! pls be nice 2 me, i'm suffering with like. sinusitis or something LOL
> 
> you can find me on twitter [@decdlights](https://twitter.com/decdlights) (where i'm most active) and also on tumblr [@lndntown](https://lndntown.tumblr.com/), if you fancy following me/chatting to me!


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